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 ABOUTfeatured: 30 Best Snorkeling Blogs Fun Ways to enjoy the caribbeanApr 7, 10 Comments Off
 Red Boring Sponge Good evening all, guess what, it’s finally raining!!! We woke this morning to standing water and a light rain and it hasn’t stopped all day, it’s so great! This island needed rain so bad, our desert is completely brown and most of the cacti are dying so this couldn’t have come at a better time! It was a difficult day at work trying to take photos outside but with the help of others we were able to photograph from under umbrellas.
This is one of my personal favorites from Bonaire. This is something I haven’t seen much in Curacao but in Bonaire I found three or four fantastic specimens. This is called Red Boring Sponge, Cliona delitrix. What your looking at folks is a red to red-orange sponge that at first glance appears to be an encrusting sponge, but actually bores into coral heads. They do this by secreting minute amounts of acid. From the exterior there is usually no visible damage, however the corals interiors may be riddled with tunnels and chambers that may eventually cause their structures to disintegrate. For those of you who remember sponges draw water in from hundreds of tiny holes called Incurrent Pores and exits into the body’s interior cavity and out the animals one or more large Excurrent Openings or Oscula. It’s easy to see the excurrent openings here. I have friends here that are starting to call me a “sponge freak” or maybe “sponge geek” would be better, but they are so cool! Some of this text was again from our underwater Bible, the Reef Creature Identification book by Paul Humann and Ned Deloach without these books we would be lost.
Thanks for all the mail helping me find a name for my little reptile I sent out yesterday. The real name is a Spectacled Teju, Gymnophthalmus lineatus or as others call it here a Red Tailed Skink. Thanks to everyone for helping.
It’s still raining, this will make our walk with the dogs tomorrow very interesting! We went to see the new movie from DreamWorks last night called “How to train a Dragon” it was great! See you tomorrow, Barry
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